STATE OF THE ART

STATE OF THE ART; PC Help In a Hurry, For a Fee

By Michel Marriott

Published: November 2, 2000

NO matter what sort of computer, new or old, you place in your home or office or even toss in your briefcase, the moment will arrive, as unavoidably as death and taxes, when your computer fails to do what it is supposed to do.

So what do you do?

The computer usually isn't physically broken. But rather, somewhere in its scads of installed software, deep in the program's millions of lines of code, your PC is, let's say, confused. Badly confused. Starting the most routine chores on a confused computer is often interrupted with rude beeps, belches and alarming (and befuddling) messages like ''fatal error'' and ''cache memory failure.'' And there's the frozen screen, when all appears just fine but nothing works.

After recently cleaning up my overburdened hard drive by deleting programs I no longer used, I discovered that I began having trouble opening up some of my key desktop applications, like the hot sync to my Palm VII. Whenever I tried, I repeatedly received two disturbing messages: ''A device attached to the system is not functioning'' and ''Error start program. The MSVCIRT.DLL file is linked to missing export MSVCRT.DLL: ??